Our Outreach

This season, we had a wonderful chance to collaborate with the Charlottesville Innovation Business Council (CBIC) and Piedmont Virginia Community College which allowed us to participate in the 13th annual CBIC Tech Tour! We visited the UVA Medical Center and Link Lab, guided by experts in their fields.

At the Medical Center, we looked at some ways that advanced simulators are used to train medical students, including operating room simulators, ultrasound simulators, and Harvey. From the texture of the skin to the reaction to injected drugs, the simulations were hyper-realistic!

At the Link Lab, we saw the development of a machine-learning algorithm allowing NAO robots to determine children’s emotions based on visual cues. The robots were a perfect example of how the concepts we learn are used to improve our world and how we may utilize the skills we developed in the club after we graduate.

Early in our competition season, we held a booth at ClubFest, hosted by the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Virginia! We had the opportunity to showcase our club’s work and talk with many young minds, who had a great time learning about our previous season’s robot and piloting it around the festival with surprising success! From this experience, we learned much about using our platform to garner interest from those younger than us, and we enjoyed getting out in our community and working with the next generation of engineers!

Outreach is a vital part of our mission as a club and for us, includes reaching up to experts in our field to learn more about how the things we learn in robotics apply to careers in our world, reaching across to other FTC teams to help each other grow as builders, coders, and people, and reaching out to our community to promote interest in Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering. Read more about our impact below!

This summer, we hosted a stand at KidVention, a day-long program sponsored by the Virginia Discovery Museum to promote STEM interests in kids! We brought a maze for Spheros, robotics kids that the kids could assemble, and of course, our competition robots for them to learn about and drive! This outreach helped many of our members to develop leadership skills in the organization of the event! We are so happy that we could contribute our experience and passion for STEM to the next generation of engineers and learners!